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Notes -
*Treason in Canada
Background:
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This seems to be a legit constitutional crisis (for lack of a better term) for Canada. If nothing happens and the names don’t get released, I would expect substantial ramifications for Canadian society. I would expect foreign influence to sky rocket and for corruption in the Canadian parliament to become an open market. If the government is willing protect treasonous MPs, even when they are all but publically outed, why would hostile parties not just openly buy as many MPs as possible?
I would also expect this situation to cause faith in the government to plummet and for separatist sentiment in Quebec and the Prairies to increase. Trudeau has publically opposed the concept of Canadian nationhood/sovereignty. For example, he said that there is no such thing as a Canadian identity and that he views Canada is the world’s first “postnational state.” He has also presided over an aggressive immigration policy which has put incredible pressure on the social fabric, on the housing market, and on health care. Now, on top of all this, is an openly treasonous government.
Will this be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? I'm surprised there isn't more news and discussion about this. @KulakRevolt can we get a QRD from the inside?
*As is true of the US, I’m sure there is a technical definition of treason in Canadian law. Whether the actions of any particular MP rise to that level does not change the political implications.
I think this situation can be more fairly characterized as a crisis for the current government and balance of power in Parliament than a full-blown constitutional crisis, unless we are speculating about the second- and third-order effects for trust in institutions, separatist sentiments, or populist sentiments on the left/right.
What should hopefully come to pass is that the facts will come out, names will be named, and it will become clear that the Liberals have their hands dirtiest all the way up to the level of the PMO (side remark: the PM himself may not be directly implicated, since if you have been listening to him lately, he doesn’t read his briefs or keep close tabs on anything his advisors are up to). Once that happens, we would hope for a criminal investigation and a swift vote of non-confidence, not necessarily in that order, leading to a change in the party in power.
The real confounder here is how much the Tories and especially the NDP have their hands dirty as well. If the other parties are as complicit as the Liberals, they might be able to keep the current balance of power in place for another year through collusion, at enormous cost to the relationship between the Canadian People and our most hallowed institution of “Good Government”. But that would only postpone the inevitable electoral judgement day.
A preview of the next 6-18 months.
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I think there is a spectrum of behaviors going from "bad optics" to "corrupt" to "treason".
If you are accepting campaign donations or gifts from some foreign, state-sponsored NGO that is mostly bad optics (unless your constituents are on board with that). (Depending on local laws, INAL, don't accept bags of money based on something you read on the internet.)
If you do the above, but with a clear understanding that you intend to influence policy towards your money-giver, that would be corruption. If done correctly, this can be hard to prove. Did you vote for that trade agreement with the country sponsoring you because you were bought, or just because you genuinely believed that to be a good thing?
I would use the word treason in cases in which you also violate vital interests of your home country. Passing on secret military information, unsuccessfully participating in a coup and the like.
Over here in Europe, getting gifts from foreign nations (such as Azerbaijan) is not unheard of. More recently, Krah (AfD) and some of the people working for him have been accused of taking money from Russia and China, respectively. Typically, the worst offenders get prosecuted, but it is not like the voters really care.
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When has Trudeau opposed Canadian sovereignty?
He has done so in the link provided, unless you believe Trudeau is himself sovereign. Trudeau's statement that 'Canada is a postnational state' is indistinguishable from the denial of Canadian sovereignty and is in fact a naked argument for Comintern.
Is this rhetoric surprising? It shouldn't be. Its Trudeau, the literal communist heir. And not just any type of communist, the type of international communist who believes that nationhood is a moral evil and that sovereignty and moral righteousness lies only in global communism.
If Canadian sovereignty has any reference to the people of Canada, discounting any non-integrated individuals, then it must be the case that Trudeau's statement denies Canadian sovereignty.
What would "postnational" mean without reference to some non-arbitrary, non-"I'm-not-touching-you" definition of Canadians? Who or what is sovereign on Trudeau's definition? Trudeau?
Apparently not Canadians. Trudeau's vision of Canada is "post" all such concerns. Thus, the concept of Canadian sovereignty, on his thinking, is "post" the fact of or concerns of the people who inhabit Canada's borders. If that which is sovereign is "post" Canada, then sovereignty doesn't lie in Canada in any meaningful respect. Therefore, Trudeau's claim that Canada is a postnational state is a denial of Canadian sovereignty.
Trudeau being Trudeau, and not any other person, its clear that his declaration of a "postnational" Canada is little more than an argument for Comintern.
That’s absurd. Sovereignty is obviously not the same thing as nationhood. Governments do all sorts of pedestrian tasks, like issuing passports or regulating products, which don’t require a national character. A post-national state, then, would happily implement those even as it opens the gates to immigrants.
You’re committing the mirror-version of appealing to Hitler. It is possible to have patriotism, aggressive foreign policy, and even a racial identity without trying to start a Fourth Reich. Likewise, preferring the boring bureaucratic parts of state sovereignty does not make one into Daddy Stalin.
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Presumably Canadian citizens, the rules for becoming one which are determined by the elected representatives of the current citizenry. Could such rules be considered arbitrary? Sure, but I think you need more than that to claim that they are illegitimate e.g. you can argue that the representatives were not enacting the will of the citizens, you can argue against democracy as a process for deciding questions of citizenship, etc. Also, if Canada had really ever been a single nation they would be speaking English in Quebec.
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That is a ridiculously huge leap.
Canadian sovereignty doesn't have any reference to the people and even if it did, that wouldn't mean his statement denies Canadian sovereignty.
This is a clearly incorrect interpretation of his meaning, which is about a lack of mainstream culture, not the lack of concern for the people. He states this explicitly.
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At what point do the rapid destabilizing demographics shifts and apparent deep corruption by foreign powers turn Canada into a national security problem for America? If things go south up north, are we going to have all those "new Canadians" hopping the border to the U.S. and bringing Canada's social ills with them? Is anyone in the U.S. govt thinking about this?
If anyone knows of real politic assessments of the US-CAN relationship, please send them my way/post them here. I hope that there are at least some plans for dealing with a rump/decrepit/hostile/defunct/failed Canada within US Govt. and policy circles. The increasing importance of the Arctic should increase demand for such thinking, along with the pivot to Asia/China, and a few other factors.
I don't think it's too difficult to come up with even armchair strategic assessments considering most of the facts on the ground haven't changed since the days of War Plan Red/Defense Scheme No. 1 and 2 (for the US and Canada, respectively, though the US plan focused more on Canada in the context of taking on the entire British Empire).
Canada is one of the easiest countries to cut completely in two: there's one road that separates East and West, and jack shit for 2000 miles between Toronto and Winnipeg (Thunder Bay exists mainly because it was the way to get from East to West before the car was invented). And no, tanks aren't getting through there either; the only way to do it is by air, sea (into Hudson's Bay), or on foot. And Canada doesn't have that many aircraft capable of transporting armor, much less armor itself (most of their tanks aren't even operable).
After that, the inevitable blockade would do most of the work. If that part of Canada is separated from its food and energy supply (yes, the hydro power is unlimited at current burn rates, but the oil and industrial inputs sure aren't and those come from the part of the nation that its army has no chance of reasonably defending) it's not going to last very long. Then all the US has to do is make sure the shanty migrant ships aren't making it, which is pretty easy to do so long as you're willing to actually stop them (and in this kind of situation, they would be). Yes, the border is very long, but that doesn't make much difference if the average Canadian cannot get to a section you don't control, and by and large they can't.
On that note, it's deceptively easy to isolate the most populated part of Canada from the US: destroy the bridges. All Ontario border crossings are over water (almost like the border is where it is for that reason), and demolition of those bridges from either side means that reinforcing an incursion on either side would become difficult very quickly. Those bodies of water are not fordable. Same thing for Quebec; Montreal and Quebec city are on the north side of the St. Lawrence, both excellent defensive positions (and have been used as such a few times, too). These nations are an ocean apart should they choose to be; for the west, destroying the bridges and road is going to have the same effect.
As far as strategic industries go, Canada doesn't have any that can't be trivially attacked by conventional rocket artillery (or standard artillery, for the communities on the St. Lawrence, as destroying those bridges means the Maritime provinces aren't going to put up much of a fight) from the US side. The same is true of all its major cities, especially Vancouver. This doesn't hold true for the US; assuming equal-capability equipment the only major US city in Canadian artillery range is Detroit (if it even qualifies as "major" any more, lol).
As far as commerce goes, Canada depends heavily on other countries to refine the products of its resource extraction (which affects the West more than the East); a collapse in the ability to trade with the US (each provinces' largest trading partner) would be catastrophic to the economy.
This is, I think, why the Defense Schemes focus more on rapid attack being the only feasible way to resist an American invasion, because the country really can't be held. Sure, a friendly Europe could resupply Upper/Lower Canada, but I think unrestricted submarine warfare (this time by the US) would likely rout those merchant marines, and the American navy is currently peerless, so the only time you have to do damage is while you still have the element of surprise.
I agree that America could annex Canada with little to no military effort. I'm more curious about the details of when, how, and under what circumstances that would happen. What are the politics and sentiments of the people? What considerations would the US have to weigh before making such a call? What are the alternatives, and what interests do those alternatives serve? Etc.
Any in depth sources on those matters would be much appreciated.
The best defense Canada has against getting annexed by the US is to import an extra 20 million South Asians (even better: an extra 40 million). The magnitude of the poison pill the US would have to swallow to get the land for itself would make even the staunchest American imperialist balk and puke.
In fact a large portion of these 40 million people will want the US to annex Canada because it means they get full access to the US jobs market!
I thought you were gonna go with the prospect of dealing with the French lol. Or more liberal states being added.
A ton of the migrants came in the recent COVID influx and don't have citizenship and can likely be deported or have visas and PR cancelled before unification.
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The US-Canada border is actually really defensible, all things considered; the bodies of water one would have to cross are significantly larger than the Rio Grande (the US would lose a war in 1812 partly for this reason). Sure, it's possible to trivially cross the border provided you can get over the St. Lawrence, but because most of the "new Canadians" live in Toronto they'd have to spend a non-trivial amount of money to do that.
The only other city that has a large population of immigrants is Vancouver, which is right on the border; a fence long enough to be more than a few days' walk would be enough to prevent those crossings (as you get into "in the middle of nowhere" territory pretty quick outside of that, and Washington State isn't exactly the most habitable place either).
If getting out of Canada became important enough, I guarantee you they would drive to the middle of nowhere and cross over into Minnesota or North Dakota.
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Unlikely any time soon. Canada has a better immigrant profile than the U.S.
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The saddest thing, is if I took a poll, i would bet that more canadians know that Trump was convicted than know that literal sitting MPs willingly assisted foreign governments.
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I've been trying to put into words why I'm against open borders and I think this is the piece I needed to understand my inherent distrust. A post-national state does not have a people, it has a territory. Other - real - nations can exploit that territory without regard for the people. The government of a nation is elected by the people to put their common good first.
Trudeau sees himself as some sort of steward of Canada's natural resources and land. His "postnational state" denies the existence of a category called "Canadian people." There is the land of Canada, and the people currently inhabiting it which he has jurisdiction over. But without having a category of Canadian people to even reference, his decisions are not sourced in what is the well-being of the Canadian people and their decedents.
If "Comintern" was still in the public parlance, you wouldn't have needed to search for such a term. Trudeau clearly sees himself as the General Secretary of the Canadian Union in its temporary position as a state, during its transition to an indivisible part of Communism.
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Strictly speaking, a post-national state need only lack a people defined by common birth or shared ancestry, and can have one defined in other ways. One can argue that nation-states are a superior form of social organization to those other ways, but they are neither untried nor historically novel (e.g. Rome, Islam).
I'm not sure ancient Rome is the correct analogy here. Rome was quite stingy with offering citizenship. It did happen, but it took hundreds of years. Even as late as 100 BC, when Rome was already master of the Mediterranean Sea, many cities and towns within 100 miles of Rome were merely "allies" and not citizens. This caused the Social War (91–87 BC) in which Rome was forced to offer citizenship to some "allies" in order to suppress the others.
It wasn't until three hundreds years later, (212 AD) under the reign of the notorious tyrant Caracalla, that the citizenship was extended to all free men in the Empire. By then, many people didn't actually want it, and the reason it was granted was to extract more tax revenues.
Rome was ascendant when it was a nation state composed of Romans. When it offered citizenship to others, it was generally from a position of weakness. I will concede that the Romans held out for a long time.
While they were in most respects stingy by modern standards, the fact that they had any form of naturalization at all was a radical break from all of their Mediterranean neighbors e.g. Athens where only people with two citizen parents were citizens themselves or Sparta with its permanent helot underclass, and this contributed to Roman military dominance as they were able to radically increase their available manpower over time. I also think the sort of mass granting of citizenship to allies as a reward for military service that Rome engaged in would be seen as radical even today, something akin to the US giving all inhabitants of Sonora citizenship in exchange for them suppressing the cartels (the closest modern equivalent might be the French Foreign Legion, which is relatively small).
If we're going by the standard chronology, where the zenith of Roman power is the death of Trajan in 117 AD, then I don't see how this is true. 2 of the 5 Good Emperors were Iberians and no one seems to have cared, not to mention the long string of Illyrian emperors who ended the third century crises and founded one, if not the greatest of Roman cities i.e. Constantinople. On that note, the fact that a bunch of Greeks went around for a thousand years calling themselves Romans seems evidence enough of the assimilatory power of Roman institutions (interestingly enough these Romans functioned more and more like a nation as they lost territory and became weaker, but it certainly wasn't the same as the original nation).
Assimilating elites and the masses are different things and changes in politics and technology matter here.
I don't think most Britons are worried about Asians who went to Harrow, which I suppose would be the equivalent to Greek and Gallic nobles fully buying into Rome.
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Good points all around. My person take is that Rome reached its zenith with the fall of Carthage. The territorial gains for the next 200 years were just the inevitable consolidation. But I recognize this might be a minority view.
And you are right to mention Sparta which largely died out because of sub replacement level fertility.
Sparta’s actual fertility rate is unknown; citizen oliganthropia in Sparta was caused by runaway inequality driving citizens below the property requirements for citizenship.
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A post-national state is usually known as an "empire".
And Canada has always been, to a point, an empire; if you don't live in the Triangle between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, your vote and your interests don't matter in the slightest when it comes to federal politics. This is slightly less true for the provinces east of that area, and provinces do have some overlap (and it's worth noting that, because the Triangle is not its own province, it can be overruled in Provincial politics especially when that Triangle has made those provinces their enemy... which, naturally, they have).
Thus that Triangle, for all intents and purposes, is Canada, and the rest is just territory that it has empire/dominion over (the "provinces" are more sub-administrative units in the ancient Roman sense; they are not "states"). Quebec's culture is more reactive/resistant to this state of affairs; the West, not as much, but the West has more in common (culturally, legally, linguistically) with the Triangle than Quebec does.
The "post-national" rhetoric is a Moldbug-ian call for Triangle residents to be more explicit in their supremacy (and an acknowledgement that the "post-national" government will put Triangle interests first) and stop thinking Canada is/should be like the US, with its checks and balances between states- which happen to prevent SoCal and the NY-DC corridor from exercising Imperial control over the rest of the nation to which they feel entitled (because the "I win" button in democracy is simply "have more voters than the other guy"; that's why the US [nominally] has laws to limit how much power that can ultimately yield, why most of the "it should be purely population that decides everything" rhetoric comes out of those places, and why each side has the immigration policies that they do- and this is generally seen as legitimate in the mind of the average resident, even those opposed to the Triangle, the most major effect being that this is why Quebec-minus-Montreal isn't its own nation right now).
It's worth noting that #notAllTriangleResidents, of course- even in the Triangle, Canada is still generally seen through the US lens of a collection of polities working together to accomplish some common goal, with a common-ish culture, with some differences (otherwise there would be no need to have Triangle residents see their empire for what it truly is). This is an even more popular view in the West, which is why when the West (and to a point, its elites) comes to protest the Triangle and its people -> policies they wave Canadian flags, not separatist ones.
I think that for [the idea, and "nation", of] Canada to be stable going forward the rest of the nation needs some much-needed checks and balances against the Triangle; that is what the Senate is nominally for (and, very revealingly, it was initially set up so that Ontario + Quebec alone could veto any legislation, though that's not what it does in practice). Of course, usually when this happens, a pan-dominion government can be elected in the Triangle and imposes on the Triangle elite anyway (which, naturally, deflates separatist movements); that happened post-Trudeau once, and perhaps it'll happen again.
This seems off given the history of the current edition of the Conservative Party of Canada. Stephen Harper is an Albertan, and he built his political career in a party which was initially founded with the explicit goal of providing better representation of Western interests (Reform), and gradually evolved into a generic right-populist anti-Triangle elites party (Canadian Alliance) before doing a reverse takeover of the moribund Progressive Conservative party. Poilievre represents a riding in the Ottawa suburbs, but he grew up in Alberta, was a member of Reform/Canadian Alliance before the merger, started his political career in Albertan student politics, and only moved to Ottawa because he co-founded a lobbying firm with a man who would go on to be Attorney-General of Alberta. I think it is clearly fair to describe Poilievre as Albertan as well.
Even back in the PC era, Brian Mulroney (the last PC prime minister to serve a full term) grew up in (non-Triangle) eastern Quebec and represented a riding in eastern Quebec, although he did have a non-political career in Montreal in between.
The Triangle only dominates Canadian politics when the Liberals are in government and, despite what the Liberals want you to think, that isn't all the time. The Canadian party system in 2024 absolutely represents the interests of Western-Canada-outside-metro-Vancouver - probably beyond the level of representation the population out there merits.
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I’m curious if there’s anything to be done about it when liberals, to whom the majority of the corrupt MP’s probably belong if for no other reason than they hold a majority, don’t want to.
If the NDP at any point grows a pair (probably requires turfing Jagmeet, which would also be a good idea, for them) you could see a majority-backed confidence motion on this which would get either information or an election in short order.
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Of course China and India are corrupting Canada: the Chinese and Indians have been given free reign to immigrate, for the former in their stronghold of Vancouver, the latter more concentrated in Ontario. Neither group treats democracy the way whites do, voting for policy, but instead use it as an ethnic tally, and in particular the more you see these races immigrate and vote, the more you see the representatives allowing them to continue immigrating. Both countries are increidbly populous and have grown relatively wealthy over the last two decades, and that wealth is now being used to control places like Canada.
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